2008 in reviewLife and styleFrom the election of Barack Obama to economic meltdown, from the Beijing Olympics to the Baby P trial, Decca Aitkenhead recalls the year's best and worst times'It has been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America." When Ohio had swung to the Democrats hours earlier that November 4th night, Barack Hussein Obama had quietly turned to his campaign manager. "So it looks like we're going to win this thing, huh?" All year, he had been promising his country, "Yes we can", and all year the world had waited to see if the "skinny kid with a funny name" really could. Many thought it profoundly unlikely. Barack is Swahili derived from Arabic, Hussein a grandson of the prophet Muhammad and Obama rhymes with Osama. "That's not a name," marvelled the New Yorker, "it's a catastrophe." But in a year that would make history for economic catastrophe, they turned out to be the happiest three words.
During its early months, it had seemed as if the year was holding its breath, aware that something was coming, but not sure what. George Bush would be gone, but who would take his place? In the calm before the storm, we wondered what would happen to the credit crunch, and whether the wealth the world had known would survive. When the financial storm finally hit, it struck with such pitiless force that no one yet knows what will be left when it subsides. But it blew a wind of change through the White House that would be celebrated all over the world.
"To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores," Obama declared before a quarter of a million Americans in Chicago's Grant Park, "from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand."
Every year brings the best of times and the worst of times, but in 2008 it would be the worst that delivered the best.
We had been warned this would be a difficult year, but for the first half it just seemed extraordinarily expensive. Property values began tumbling, but the price of everything else was rising, and in Britain the soaring cost of food produced a fashion in the lifestyle press for faintly ironic guides to sourcing sun-dried tomatoes in Lidl. But across the world, people were beginning to starve. In the spring, 12 died during riots for bread in Egypt, forcing the army to begin baking loaves; and in April Haitian protests killed five and brought down the government. By the summer, hunger riots had erupted in more than 30 countries, forcing the UN to pledge $1.2bn for food aid.
Why was food so expensive? As the drought in Australia entered its sixth year, and Cyclone Nargis tore through the rice fields of Burma in May, killing more than 100,000, some blamed climate change. Others blamed our solution to climate change - the switch from growing food to biofuels. If, as many suggested, the real answer lay on the gentrified dining tables of India and China's new middle classes, who were developing a taste for meat, the west was scarcely in a position to criticise. The only culprit upon which everyone could agree was the staggering rise in oil prices.
When the price of a barrel of oil hit $100 in January, traders spoke of a "historic" peak. By July, they would be misty-eyed with nostalgia for such a bargain, as the price roared past $140 and on towards $150. "Fuel poverty" became a British buzzword as domestic fuel bills, which had jumped 15% in January, rocketed up again by another 35%, the biggest price rise of a utility ever seen; and out of the financial skies our airlines came tumbling, as Maxjet, Silverjet and XL filed for bankruptcy. Holidaymakers were stranded all over the world, but optimists divined in their plight the possible solution to climate change. If we couldn't afford to go abroad any more, perhaps we'd save the world. Credit crunch eco chic was cool this summer, and when schools broke up it seemed as if the entire population of Notting Hill decamped to Cornwall.
There was a strange, almost surreal air of denial in those last weeks of late summer before the financial crisis struck. When the chancellor warned that economic times were "arguably the worst they've been in 60 years", he incited the same frenzied indignation once incurred by pointing out how few clothes an emperor had on. What on earth was he talking about? Inflation might be running at almost double the treasury's target level, and the housing market might be crashing, but our world was surely still turning on the reliable axis of consumerism we'd known for so long. Then the credit crunch crashed, and everything changed.
On September 15, America woke up to the single biggest bankruptcy in the nation's history. After a century and a half in business, Lehman Brothers - Wall Street aristocracy - had ceased overnight to exist. As stunned bankers filed out of offices later that day, clutching boxes of belongings and blinking into the news cameras, it wasn't long before they would be described as the first casualties of a financial 9/11.
Most of us were familiar with the meaning of "sub-prime lending", but only now did we grasp its full significance as America's banks began teetering on the brink. Merrill Lynch was the next, and a day later the insurance giant AIG escaped bankruptcy only with an $85bn government bail-out. A week earlier the US treasury had been forced to nationalise Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, but nothing could save Washington Mutual. The impenetrable jargon of global finance - credit default swaps, collateralised debt obligations, Libor rates - was suddenly the vocabulary of everyday conversation, as the Dow recorded the largest fall on a single day in its history. Panicking, the White House drafted a $700bn bail-out that achieved the improbable feat of offending both rightwing free market principle and leftwing anti-Wall Street sentiment, and brought the treasury secretary to his knees on the floor of Congress as he pleaded with house leader Nancy Pelosi to pass the bill.
Investment bankers revered for years as masters of the universe faced furious chants of "Main Street not Wall Street!" outside their Manhattan skyscrapers, but a terrible truth was dawning. The distinction might hold moral legitimacy - but as an economic manifesto, it was no more than wishful thinking. In George Bush's inimitable words, "If money isn't loosened up, this sucker is going to go down", and it was capable of taking all of us with it. What former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan described as a "once-in-a-century credit tsunami" came sweeping across the Atlantic - and a great tide of toxic debt broke on to our shores in late September.
The nationalisation of Bradford & Bingley was a horrible shock, but that was as nothing to news that the government had offered to bail out almost every leading bank - Abbey, Barclays, HBOS, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Nationwide and the Royal Bank of Scotland. When Iceland's banking system collapsed, taking billions of our savings with it, near panic broke out. Was our money safe anywhere? Would we even have any left to bank? Job losses began leading the evening news, axed from every sector as unemployment sped towards two million, predicted to pass three million next year. Billions were wiped off the stock exchange, the pound plunged, interest rates fell to 1951 levels, oil dropped to $40 a barrel and the year's early fears of rising inflation became a quaint distant memory as we confronted the danger of deflation. Even the familiar furniture of the high street, Woolworths and MFI, collapsed before our eyes.
The recession will not be official until the new year, but by then the only doubt will be whether it could become a depression. Like a perfect storm, every conceivable indicator was already in place by the end of the autumn, the superlative statistics of a record-breaking downturn almost commonplace by the end of the year. Could this really be the end of modern capitalism? Nobody knew. The only certainty of the crisis was its sensational intervention in political fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic.
When the prime minister stood before his party in September and declared, "This is no time for a novice", in his wildest dreams he could never have hoped the words would prove so potent or prophetic. Labour had gathered in Manchester in a sour, mutinous mood, more like a dysfunctional soap opera family than a governing party, trailing in the polls by more than 20 points and staring down the barrel at not just electoral defeat but a bloodbath. The solution was unclear - David Miliband? Ed Balls? Jon Cruddas? - but on the problem there was near unanimity: Gordon Brown had to go.
For nine agonising months, the prime minister had looked more like a national joke than a leader. In May, Labour recorded its worst local election results in 40 years and lost the London mayoralty to Boris Johnson, a challenger many had dismissed as an unelectable buffoon. The publication of Cherie Blair and John Prescott's memoirs, shamelessly peddling "unmentionable" contraceptive mishaps and rampant bulimia, might in kinder times have revived respect for Brown's reserve, as might Nick Clegg's modest boast of having slept with "no more" than 30 women. But later that month Labour lost the Crewe and Nantwich byelection to a 17.6% swing, following an ill-judged anti-toff campaign derided by David Cameron as the death certificate of New Labour.
In truth, the defeat probably owed more to the 10p tax fiasco. Alistair Darling had to find £2.7bn to compensate the country's lowest earners for his predecessor's carelessness in his final budget, mocked by David Cameron as a "humiliation" for Brown - a view endorsed by Frank Field's prediction that his "unhappy" leader could not survive to fight the next election. Rumours of dark paranoia inside Number 10 only worsened a month later, when on Brown's first anniversary in office the Greens and the BNP beat Labour into fifth place in the Henley byelection. The loss of Glasgow East in July by a 22.5% swing looked like the final nail in his coffin. "We have moved," a former minister despaired, "from a one nation to a no nation party, thanks to Gordon."
The August recess should have offered some reprieve, but the contrast between holiday photos of the Browns and the Camerons was too cruel for the press to resist. There were David and Sam, getting fresh on the beach in their surfwear, looking not only, one columnist noted, "as if they're actually on holiday", but "as if they've actually been on holiday before". And then there, oh dear God, were Gordon and Sarah in Suffolk, looking like a couple "in an ad from the back of the Telegraph, offering a cure for an embarrassing complaint". The only conversation in the conference hotel bars was who would wield the dagger and when - by then less a political assassination than a mercy killing.
Yet just days later Brown would be hailed as the "saviour" of global capitalism. The comeback kid who beats the odds owes more to the sentimental imagination of Hollywood than to British political history, but as the banking system collapsed, Brown was suddenly commanding the world stage, coordinating a global cut in interest rates. "This combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn't been matched by any other western government," gushed the Nobel prizewinning economist Paul Krugman. "The British government went straight to the heart of the problem."
Whether Brown can solve it remains to be seen, but he certainly seemed to be enjoying himself. "I was standing behind him the other day," observed one Labour MP, "and even his hair looked confident." On the opposite benches, his old tormentor George Osborne was looking much less pleased with himself, chastened by a strangely Edwardian scandal dubbed Corfugate. Peter Mandelson's cabinet return had seemed at first to promise such sport, and the shadow chancellor couldn't resist telling tales of Mandy "dripping pure poison" about Brown over dinner in Corfu. But Osborne hadn't reckoned on the wrath of Nat Rothschild, who accused his old friend of soliciting illegal donations on a Russian oligarch's yacht, and almost cost him his job. Osborne might have looked every inch the Hooray Henry in his Bullingdon tails, but he didn't appear to know it was non-U to breach the privacy of one's aristocratic holiday host.
More worryingly, he didn't appear to know what to do about the economic crisis. The Tories' central proposal seemed to be to do nothing. Labour's multibillion-pound borrowing and tax-cutting pre-budget report was a spectacular gamble, but if Brown looked more reckless than prudent, Cameron risked looking dangerously lightweight. Even John Hutton, who once predicted Brown would be "a fucking awful prime minister", was overheard murmuring, "Cometh the hour, cometh the man." As the year drew to a close, the question in Westminster was, cometh an early election?
If every election could be as much fun as the US presidential campaign, we would have one every year. "They said this day would not come," Barack Obama declared in his victory speech. "But at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do." But that was only in Iowa, on a cold night in January, after beating Hillary Clinton in the first caucus of the race. Days later, she wept in a New Hampshire coffee shop, won the state, and the longest election in American history had only just begun.
What looked like a progressive's dream - a primary battle between a black man and a woman - had its unedifying moments. "Iron my shirt!" hecklers yelled at Clinton, while talkshow hosts fixated on her "cackle" and mocked her trouser suits. She excused her husband's odious conflation of Obama's campaign with Jesse Jackson's bids, whose only shared characteristic was the colour of the two contenders' skin, attributing it to "sleep deprivation". "Misspoke" was another ominously slippery Clintonism for making up a story about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia.
For a few heart-stopping days in March, footage of Obama's preacher shouting, "God damn America!" from the pulpit threatened to destroy his campaign, until Obama responded with a speech about race that moved even his own team to tears. By the summer his lead had become unassailable - but still Clinton refused to concede, pinning her last hopes on the party's superdelegates, and turning us all into armchair experts on the arcane internal mechanisms of the Democratic nomination.
When Obama at last declared victory in June, beating John McCain looked like the easy bit. But no one had bargained on a surprise late entry from Alaska - the gun-toting, moose-eating beauty queen who blazed into the race in August, wiping Obama off the front pages. Neither Troopergate nor a pregnant teenage daughter looked like stopping Sarah Palin from coming a heartbeat away from the Oval Office - until one of the most hilarious interviews in television history revealed that her foreign policy credentials consisted of being able to "see Russia" from her house.
Yet still, unbelievably, the polls remained locked in a tie. Obama was a Muslim, whispered Republican robocalls - a vacuous celebrity, a friend of terrorists. At Republican rallies, crowds screamed, "Kill him!" But when the banks began collapsing, McCain's fatal attempt to "suspend" his campaign exposed a shakiness on economics that would prove catastrophic. "I think," Obama pointed out, "that it is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once."
As Brown might have said, these were serious times for serious people. Culture wars were a luxury distraction voters could suddenly no longer afford, and not even Joe the Plumber could save McCain as Obama's lead opened up. The Republican dream ticket was turning into a nightmare as it emerged that the Palins had spent more than $150,000 of campaign money on clothes - "Like hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," despaired a McCain aide. By the time the polls opened on November 4, the running mates were barely speaking.
"This is not about me, it's about you," Obama had kept assuring his supporters. But in truth it was all about him - an extraordinary rock star candidate who had rewritten the rules of American politics. This is not about race, his campaign had always said - but when Obama was declared president-elect, the celebrations that erupted across America and the world suggested it certainly was. America had elected a black man to the White House, and suddenly it looked like a new country.
How the rest of the world would look when President Obama and secretary of state Clinton took office next year was less promising. The Pakistani-led terrorist rampage in Mumbai in November killed nearly 200, ending a dangerous year for the region which opened with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. President Musharraf's reign was soon over, but the succession of Bhutto's widower looked more like dynasty than democracy, in a febrile country whose northern border regions were becoming ungovernable, radicalised by their Taliban neighbours and US bombing raids. Across the border, the war in Afghanistan claimed its 133rd British soldier, and a public admission from the departing commander of British forces that it was probably unwinnable.
Such doubts didn't appear to trouble Prince Harry, whose brief adventure fighting "Terry Taliban and his mates" secured his media makeover from playboy of Mahiki to war hero of Helmand. The prince had to come home in February, after a US website breached a news blackout, but if he was disappointed, the tabloids were ecstatic, free to publish swooning coverage of brave Harry on the battlefield, "just one of the lads", in his plucky baseball cap stitched with the words "We do bad things to bad people." It was so much more agreeable than reporting from Iraq, where the surge sort of seemed to be working, maybe, even if suicide bombers still kept exploding, and the only real question was how soon we could get out and leave them to it.
The year in Africa began violently, when Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki claimed to have won an election he appeared to have lost, triggering tribal riots that would leave 1,700 dead and Kenya's harmonious reputation in tatters. In Congo there were rebel atrocities, and off the coast of Somalia pirate hijacks, but the greatest tragedy would be Zimbabwe, bloodied and broken to the brink of a failed state. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the first round of March elections resoundingly, but Robert Mugabe insisted upon a second in June, and unleashed the vengeance of Zanu PF. "How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?" sneered Mugabe - and it couldn't. As his supporters were tortured and murdered, Tsvangirai took refuge in a foreign embassy and abandoned the "illegitimate sham of an election process", delivering a sixth term to Mugabe. A post-election power-sharing agreement predictably proved worth even less than Zimbabwe's currency, whose monthly inflation rate reached an incomprehensible 13.2 billion per cent in December. By then a cholera outbreak had killed more than 500, and even Desmond Tutu was calling in despair for armed force to remove Mugabe.
Mugabe did lose his old ally Thabo Mbeki, whose South African presidency drew to a premature but unlamented close in September. It was goodbye, too, to Fidel Castro in Cuba, after 49 years in power. In July it was a surprise hello to Radovan Karadzic, the Serbian fugitive found in the heart of Belgrade disguised as "Dragan Dabic", a bearded homeopathic doctor whose high reputation for special healing powers must surely be the final indictment of new age medicine. It was goodbye to the Reverend Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland, and goodbye in March to President Putin - although following Russia's parliamentary vote to extend presidential terms to six years, it may well be hello again as soon as next year. When Russian troops rolled into Georgia in August, fighting over the disputed territory of South Ossetia, for a few tense weeks the world wondered if it was saying hello again to the cold war.
But the international year belonged, above all, to China. Nothing would be allowed to rain on its parade - not the Sichuan earthquake that killed 90,000 in May, nor the Tibetan protests that dogged the Olympic torch, nor Steven Spielberg's resignation in solidarity, nor the sinister Beijing smog, nor the brutal security sweeps to clear dissidents and vagrants out of sight, nor the rejection of every single application for a place in the farcical "protesters' pens", nor the substitution of a "cute" seven-year-old to mime over a less telegenic singer at the opening ceremony. This was Beijing's coming-out party for a new global superpower, and the world watched in awe as Usain Bolt's lightning lit up the Bird's Nest stadium, and Michael Phelps swam into the history books. Any fuss here at home about China's human rights record was abruptly forgotten when Team GB delivered its best Olympic performance in more than a century.
England's cricketers had a less happy year, for if competing in a tacky Texan's $20m 20/20 match against the Stanford All-Stars wasn't humiliation enough, defeat was the final indignity. Britain's footballers didn't even get the opportunity for their customary disappointment, having been obliged to watch Euro 2008 on the telly at home. Andy Murray's place in the US Open final suggested we might have a tennis player who would actually win things, though, and Ricky Hatton boxed his way back to respectability in Las Vegas. But when Lewis Hamilton crossed the finishing line in Brazil and became the youngest ever formula one champion, the euphoria was unqualified. If not quite a British Obama, Lewis was still a national fairytale, the working-class black boy who grew up to be champion of the world.
There was a darker, Grimm's fairytale quality to the children's stories of 2008 that gripped the tabloids. In February, a child abuse investigation at a former Jersey home took a macabre turn with the discovery of what appeared to be a child's bones buried in the cellar. Underground "punishment" rooms fitted with "shackles" were said to have been excavated, and the last of the press pack still looking for Madeleine McCann in Praia da Luz packed their bags and flew to Jersey. After six months of ghoulish speculation, it transpired that if any of the bones were, in fact, human, they dated back to the 15th century.
The children hidden in Josef Fritzl's cellar were real, though. For 24 years, the Austrian had imprisoned and raped his daughter Elisabeth in a dungeon beneath the family home, fathering seven children, and raising three of them upstairs with his astonishingly unsuspecting wife. A twin who died at birth was burned in his incinerator, but the remaining three had been underground all their lives, until their rescue in April, when they surfaced - anaemic and stooped - into a world they had never seen before. "It was a beautiful idea for me," the 74-year-old told police. "The cellar of my house belonged to me and to me alone. It was my kingdom."
Had social workers grasped that the Haringey flat where Baby P lived was not, as his mother had lied, hers alone, but shared by a boyfriend and a lodger who helped torture the toddler to death, perhaps Baby P would have lived. But the same tabloids who bayed for their blood for this "unforgivable" error hadn't exactly been careful themselves in the lies they'd reported about Madeleine McCann's parents. Libel damages of almost £1m were paid to the couple and their friends, funding a search that grew ever more heartbreakingly forlorn.
Hopes of ever finding Shannon Matthews alive had all but faded only 25 days after the nine-year-old went missing from a Dewsbury estate in the spring. But the euphoria of her discovery, hidden in the divan bed of her stepfather's uncle, soon gave way to incredulity when the mother who'd sobbed for her daughter's safe return was charged with arranging her kidnap. To many, the mother of seven by five different fathers was an object of psycho-social pity, but according to the judge, Karen Matthews was a veritable fairytale witch, "pure evil".
The most entertaining courtroom drama of the year was provided by Max Mosley, son of Oswald, who successfully sued the News Of The World for invasion of privacy after it falsely reported an orgy involving Mosley, five prostitutes, "Nazi" overtones, German accents and concentration camp role-play. Naomi Campbell's trial for assaulting a police officer on a BA flight after her bag was lost also had its moments. "You can't fucking touch me, my cousin is Scotland Yard," the supermodel had allegedly screamed, before aiming a high kick "uncomfortably close to his groin", the prosecution solemnly reported, "wearing formidable platform boots with stiletto heels". Campbell received 200 hours' community service, but sympathy from the owners of the 15,000 other bags stuck in the baggage system at Terminal 5. At its glitzy opening, the Queen had declared the £4.3bn T5 a "21st-century gateway to Britain", but within days hundreds of flights had to be cancelled and stranded passengers had scrawled "Welcome to hell" on the lavatory walls.
In August, a court overturned Barry George's conviction for the murder of Jill Dando, and after eight years behind bars he walked free. Steve Wright never will, after receiving a whole life term in February for his murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich last year. Nor will Levi Bellfield, a nightclub bouncer dubbed the "bus stop killer" who murdered two women and attacked a third. The canoe man and his wife, John and Anne Darwin, were each sentenced to six years, but the seven men accused of plotting to blow up transatlantic planes with liquid explosives face a retrial next year, after a jury failed to reach a verdict.
Princess Diana's inquest finally drew to a close more than a decade after her death, with a verdict of unlawful killing due to the gross negligence of driver Henri Paul and the paparazzi, which surprised literally no one except Mohamed Al Fayed. The inquest into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes was more contentious, though: the coroner had ruled out a verdict of unlawful killing, so after seven days of deliberation the jury recorded an open verdict. By then, though, Sir Ian Blair was already gone, sacked in October by Boris Johnson.
Whoever replaces the metropolitan commissioner will inherit a youth knife crime wave that neither metal detectors, stop and search operations, "Broken Britain" headlines or mourning relatives' marches seemed able to arrest. By December 1, 66 teenagers in Britain had met a violent death this year, more than two-thirds of them by a knife, and almost half in London. Accounts of the murders became so routinely gruesome, it seemed scarcely credible that they could involve children, but in the details there could be terrible reminders. Witnesses to one 16-year-old stab victim relayed his dying words: "I don't want to die. I want my mum."
Perhaps the saddest place of all in Britain was Bridgend, where another young suicide in August brought the total to 23 since 2007. The mystery of why so many youngsters did want to die was one no one could answer.
The world their generation will inherit is certainly a lot poorer than it was a year ago. But in the end, 2008 would be remembered for the audacity of its hope. "It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to where we are today, but we have just begun," Obama promised in Grant Park. "Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today."
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